> Several of Bankman-Fried's previous defense teams quit on him

I remember SBF told someone at some point during his ill-advised media tour post-collapse, that his lawyers could "go fuck themselves".

But I was wondering what happened then with said lawyer... Is there a list somewhere of the teams that quit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_from_representation

Even though this wasn't necessarily a moral issue, it did almost cost him his job and marriage. He didn't get the energy he wanted, but he did get rage issues. I kept trying to point this out, but he just wouldn't listen. He never admitted he was wrong about using T, however he was forced to quit using it.

It feels quite classically narcissist to me. I work for one. I'm not saying that lack of moral compass and narcissist are identical traits, but there are similar issues.

And as someone working for that sort of personality, I go through a simple reassurance process every day: have a lost sight of his true being (narccissist) or am I all the sudden calling him brilliant, drinking the cool-aid, saying I love him.

Luckily, I'm firmly grounded that I know who/what I am getting when I speak with him but talk with folks all over the company that are on the other side. It's amazing to hear it. SBF was that CEO and unfortunately, in my view, most of his folks were in the kool-aid/love-you camp.

To add to the parent post that had this: > It is extremely difficult to represent someone who thinks they did nothing wrong

It's extremely difficult to work with someone who thinks they can do no wrong as well. I try hard NOT to be that person.

  No differences were observed between exercising and nonexercising and between placebo and [600mg test-e] treated subjects for any of the 5 subdomains of [Multi-Dimensional Anger Inventory]

That’s one of the reason that transgender treatment is so insidious. Give a depressed teen girl testosterone and they will always feel incredible. Regardless of whether it’s actually a medically necessary treatment, it’s a treatment that makes you feel good. Psych meds can’t compete.

What does testosterone have to do with a moral compass?

But two points remain. 1. Had they been able to sustain this Ponzi scheme to IPO, he would be celebrated as a tech-god, as opposed to facing hard time. 2. The VCs aren't required to disclose their sales of crypto. My guess is they made money of this clown, directly at the expense of all the FTC users he fleeced. As long as that keeps happening, this sort of thing will never stop.

I've always felt this was probably the case. Take an idiot that needs to feel important, tell him he's a "boy genius" who can do no wrong and is always going to be misunderstood, and you basically have the perfect patsy. Till the end SBF just could not let go of that idea that he was smarter than everyone else, never realizing that this was always just a marketing gimmick.

At least Caroline Ellison had the sense to realize that she was living a delusion and quickly did what she could to walk away with minimal harm done to herself. In a few years she'll probably find herself making book deals and getting paid outrageous consulting fees once memory fades enough.

Like Jordan Belfort of Wolf of Wall Street infamy, or Andy Fastow of Enron. Why shouldn't she get in on the action? American publishers love a comeback story.

    Take an idiot that needs to feel important, tell him he's a "boy genius"

I know very specific reasons people think Musk, Jobs, Gates, Zuck, and others are geniuses even if I don't agree in every case.

But... SBF? What did he even allegedly do (or preside over) that seemed smart or unique? It was... a crypto exchange. They had their own coin. Uh. Those are not unique things. I don't get it.

But your comment made me think. Maybe it was just an empty bubble of perception. VCs pretended he was a genius so they could use him, and told everybody he was a genius, so everybody thought he was a genius even though nobody could point to why they thought that way.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo... (wayback machine is needed because sequoia has taken it down)

He had a pedigree, I guess, and made some... money doing the arbitage thing. But also a lot of people do that? There seems to be no real intrinsic reason why this guy would be seen as a star.

I guess it was just kind of a "right guy right place right time thing" thing.

I'm reminded of the Johnny Carson line after dealing with crazy entertainment types: I'd give my bottom dollar for a regular person right now.

SBF founded FTX in 2019 when he was ~27 years old. At that point he had gone to MIT and done some arbitage stuff. More than I've accomplished but I mean, I'm not really seeing anything that ticketed this guy for stardom.

By age 27, Jobs had founded Apple Computer and was one of the major players in launching the whole personal computing industry.

I don't think highly of Elon Musk but I have zero difficulty understanding why people would think he's a genius sort of guy and give him money. Even I have to admit he's been at the helm for some wild achievements. Also certainly a charismatic guy in some ways. Not going to have a shortage of money thrown at his next venture.

But SBF?

Again... what was anybody seeing in this guy? Must have just been "right place right time" when the crypto hype wave was cresting.

He was also surfing high on his messiah complex with a kind of 2020’s version of white man burden which the public was enamoured with.

To what extent were SBF and Ellison tech though? This trend of labelling more or less any new company that attracts VC funding as tech is bothersome. It's the mental loophole that allowed Adam Neumann to embezzle huge amounts of investor money too (but he did it "right" so gets away with it), by claiming that WeWork wasn't just an office leasing company but a tech platform. None of these people are engineers of any kind, none of them have developed any kind of new tech. They are just ordinary business types who run a business that happens to employ a few coders.

It is fair to call FTX and WeWork tech companies because they built platforms, powered by the internet and apps to modernize legacy offline industries. That's been the definition of a tech company since the 90's dotcom boom.

You can make a cryptocurrency without creating any new tech whatsoever. And you can create a blockchain without creating crypto.

FTX was just an ordinary financial company, AFAICT. It had a bit of software to run the order book, but wasn't run by technical people, had no R&D effort and no obvious reason to develop one, and so on.

WeWork was just a company like any other, I can't see a single factor that could make this be a tech company.

To me, at heart, a tech company must develop some new kind of tech and do so in-house.

You already mentioned WeWork. FTX is another example. Given how few "tech" start-ups and big tech companies actually produce technology as their core product, I guess the sentiment of SBF and FTX being somewhat symptomatic is fair.

But yeah if he hadn't been caught, he'd be doing well now.

And based the infamous Matt Levine interview, it was at best a legit ponzi exchange, according to what Sam himself says about the thigns being traded there.

The famous Matt Levine interview was about yield farming which as far as I know SBF didn't actually do but which he provided a striking explanation of. While that is Ponzi like it's a bit of a disservice to call it a Ponzi as it's actually rather more cunning and was the basis of most of the 'distributed finance' boom and bust.

then the IPO hits, you cash out, take your exit, and drink your mint julip or mojoto in Bermuda while the whole thing burns down 2 years later. whole lotta "not my problem" at that point, and every one would think you're a genius.

I feel like even very, very long into his prison sentence he's still going to try to talk your head off insisting it was all a big misunderstanding. And he's going to be denied parole because he's going to try the same thing with the parole board every time.

I've seen enough people like this in BigCos. Some of the worst offenders are a certain kind of ex-FAANG employee -- the super brash know-it-all who actually doesn't.

[1] There isn't really a clear definition of the term. I mean something like "people who call themselves effective altruists".

> movement exists for people who yearn to hoard obscene wealth to justify their hoarding retroactively

"Actions speak louder than words". "History shows us". Well, what actions and what history show that "effective altruism" exists for people who want to hoard obscene wealth and feel virtuous about it?

The founder of the movement, in so far as that's an identifiable single person, is William MacAskill. He (allegedly, but I've not heard any claims that it's a lie) donates everything he earns above the UK's median income, which is something like £26k/year.

(MacAskill surely deserves some criticism for helping to set SBF on the path he took -- so far as I know he didn't at any stage suggest or endorse lying, cheating, and stealing, but he did suggest something along the lines of "earn as much as you can and give as much as you can" and we know how that ended up. But I think we should distinguish "gave one person advice that ended incredibly badly" from "primarily wants to help rich people feel good about hoarding obscene wealth".)

Another candidate for "founder of effective altruism" is Peter Singer. He works as a philosophy professor, which I can't imagine is an especially well paid job, and I know he gives away a substantial fraction of his income. (He got a $1M prize not so long away and gave away all of it.)

Another is Toby Ord. Like MacAskill, he's set a not-very-high threshold and gives away any income he gets beyond it.

It doesn't seem credible to me that these people's intention was to help people justify hoarding obscene amounts of wealth.

So maybe the claim isn't that that was the original purpose of the movement, but is that that's what today's typical "effective altruists" want. I'm not sure how best to evaluate that. We could take a look at effectivealtruism.org and see what advice it gives -- does it say "you should get into a highly lucrative career and give a bit of money away" or something of the kind? Well, no. They say e.g. "A common misconception is that effective altruism is only about donating money to global health charities or ‘earning to give’. But community members support many causes besides global health, only a minority are prioritizing earning to give, and effective altruism is as much about how to use your time effectively as your money. In fact, the organization 80,000 Hours argues that for many people, their career decisions matter more than their decisions about where to donate."

There's an annual-ish "EA survey" (insert here all the usual caveats about surveys giving you unreliable and biased information) which suggests that between ~15% and ~25% of self-identified "effective altruists" think of themselves as "earning to give", which is what I would expect anyone to say who was in it to hoard obscene amounts of wealth and feel good about it.

Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. What's your evidence (or callalex's) that EA exists for people who hoard obscene wealth or want to?

I am serious, you cannot make up that @#€&

Effective altruism is just a way for sociopaths to mask their actions while they burn down the world.

If SBF was born to an average family, none of this would have happened and he might even be a normal person, maybe a little cocky. Or he would be constantly struggling to live a basic life between jobs as he keeps being fired or let go for being insufferable.

I highly doubt he would have gotten into Jane street

To be fair, he was clearly quite smart. But...not as smart as he thought he was.

I'm not a doctor or a psychologist, so I'm not making a diagnosis, just offering the possibility that that may be what is at the root of the situation.

His parents are charged too, will they end up in prison?

Have they been criminally charged? As far as I know, they have only been sued by FTX to obtain money back.

I mean, they still have their jobs as law professors at Stanford.

One of the most fascinating takeaways I had from that show was the fact that he used to play the game Diplomacy with a specific strategy: he would intentionally make alliances with other players, then stab them in the back. He would do this over and over. Why nobody figured this out, I don’t know.

So when I go back and view his actions through this lens, it makes perfect sense.

https://grantland.com/features/diplomacy-the-board-game-of-t...

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-federal-parole-sy...